The Stranger Beside Me (43 page)

Anderson said nothing to anyone. The incident hadn't seemed that unusual. A man called away from the job because his kid had gotten into trouble at school could be expected to be angry. The firefighter drove on to work, to the fire department which is housed in the same building as the Lake City Police Department.

Jackie Moore, the wife of a Lake City surgeon, was driving east on Highway 90 that morning, after picking her maid up. She saw a dirt$. white van approaching, and gasped as the van suddenly sweryed into her lane, swung back, and then swerved toward hef car again almost forcing her off the road. She caught a glimpse of the driver. It was a brown-haired man, a man who seemed angry, enraged. He was not looking at the road at all; he was looking down toward the passenger seat, and his mouth was open-as if he were shouting.

And then the van disappeared westbound, leaving Mrs. 292

Moore and her maid trembling at how close they had come to a head-on collision.

Kim's parents, Thomas Leach, a landscaper, and Freda Leach, a hairdresser, went through their work day, unaware that their little girl was missing. It was late in the afternoon when the school's attendance office called Freda routinely to ask if Kim was ill. She wasn't in school.

"But Kim is in school," her mother answered. "I drove her there myself this morning."

"No," was the answer. "She left during first period." The Leaches felt stark dread, something that only parents can know. They tried to hope that Kim had varied her usual dependable pattern, that she would come home after school with a good explanation. When she didn't, they hurried to Lake City Junior High School and searched the grounds. School authorities felt that Kim had run away, but her parents wouldn't believe that; she had been too excited about the Valentine's Day dance for one thing. But the most important element was that Kim simply wouldn't run away.

Kim didn't arrive home for supper, as the streets outside grew dark, and the wind whipped sheets of rain against their windows. Where was she?

Her parents called her best friend, all her other friends. None of them had seen Kim. Only Priscilla-who had seen her walk away toward the stranger.

The Leaches called the Lake City Police. Chief Paul Philpot tried to reassure them. The most dependable of youngsters sometimes runs away. Even as he tried to believe what he told her frantic parents, he sent a call out to all patrolmen to watch for her. Kim was a straight A student, again, like all the others, superior in every way. She would not have run away.

The BOLO on Kimberly Leach listed the clothing she had been wearing when she was last seen: blue jeans, a football jersey with 83 on the back and chest, a long brown coat with a fake-fur collar. Brown hair, brown eyes, pretty; she looked a few years older than her age, but she was really only a child.

Kimberly Leach was the same age that Meg Anders's daughter had been when Ted Bundy was first arrested in Utah, Meg's daughter who looked upon him as a father substitute. The same age that the little girl had been whose mother would not allow her to go out for hamburgers with

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Ted, the ruling that had so insulted him. "What did she think?" he'd asked me indignantly, "That I'd attack her daughter?" That afternoon, Detective James "Lester" Parmenter in Jacksonville didn't know that Kim Leach was missing in Lake City, but he was still very concerned about the man in the white van who had approached his daughter. He called Detective Steve Bodiford at the Leon County Sheriff's Office.

"I need a little help. I'm trying to check out the ownership on a white Dodge van-license number 13-D-11300. The computer's got it listed to a Randall Ragan in Tallahassee. I'd like to have him checked out. Somebody with his license number frightened my daughter yesterday. I think he was trying to pick her up. She's only fourteen." Parementer told Bodiford of the incident in the K-Mart lot, and Bodiford agreed that it was worth following up.

He had no idea how valuable the tip was, with its farreaching ramifications.

On Friday, February 10th, Bodiford tracked down Randy Ragan in the frame house behind Dunwoody Street. Sure, Ragan said, he'd lost his plate, on about January 12th. "I didn't report it stolen. I just got a new tag."

Bodiford noted the proximity to the Dunwoody crime scene, noted that a white Dodge van had been stolen on campus on February 5th, and put the two together.

And then he read the bulletin out of Lake City, and he felt cold; if there was a connection between the cases in Tallahassee and twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach's disappearance, he didn't want to think about the child's fate. She was alone, and the girls in Tallahassee hadn't had a chance, even surrounded by other people. Parmenter, hearing how all the coincidences linked up, felt a chill too; his daughter had come so close. If it hadn't been for Danny's arriving just when he did. . ..

Parmenter knew that his children might hold the key to the missing stranger iivthe white van. He arranged for them both to be hypnotized by a fellow officer, Lieutenant Bryant Mickler. Perhaps there Ivas something in their subconscious minds that they were blocking. It proved to be an ordeal for Leslie Parmenter. She was a good subject for hypnosis; Leslie not only recalled the man who'd approached her-she actually relived the experience, and she became hysterical. There was something about the

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man's face-this "Richard Burton, Fire Department"-that terrified her, as if she had sensed the evil there, the danger.

Parmenter explained, "When he got her to the point where she saw his face, she went hysterical. He had to stop right then and bring her out of it. She was fighting it, because she didn't want to see his face. And what happened to make her so fearful, I don't know." A half hour after the session, still trembling and afraid, Leslie nevertheless cooperated, along with her brother, with Police Artist Donald Bryan. They worked up a composite sketch of the man with Danny and Leslie separated. First one, and then the other. Each of the young Parmenters came up with almost identical likenesses. Later, a few days after Ted Bundy's arrest in Pensacola, Florida on February 15th, Parmenter would look at Ted's mug shots. "I thought, well, shucks. . . . you put glasses on that, and you've got a duplicate almost."

And, also a few days after Bundy's arrest, Tallahassee Investigator, W. D. "Dee" Phillips showed the Parmenter children a stack of mug shots, including one of Ted Bundy, and Danny Parmenter picked two photos. He chose Bundy's second.

Leslie Parmenter didn't hesitate at all. She picked Bundy's mug shot instantly.

"Are you sure?" Phillips asked.

"I'm positive," she answered.

But Kimberly Leach was gone. No one would find any trace of the child for eight weeks, despite a massive search that would cover four counties and nearly 2,000 square miles. Gone . . . like the others before her, young women that she had never even heard about, young women almost a continent away.

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It was February 10, 1978, and things were dosing in on Ted Bundy. Still, no one knew he was Ted Bundy, but the "dumb cops" whom he detested and reviled were beginning to pick up on him. He'd stalled his landlord, told him that he would have the money for the two months' rent in a day or so, and that was smoothed over for the moment, but he was planning to leave Tallahassee. He wouldn't have the money and couldn't see any way to get it.

Stake-outs by the Tallahassee Police Department and the Leon County Sheriffs Office were still beefing up the surveillance on the Florida State campus. Some of the cars were marked; some were not. Roy Dickey, a six-and-a-half-year veteran of the Tallahassee force, sat in his patrol car near the intersection of Dunwoody Street and St. Augustine at 10:45 P.M. on the night of the 10th. He'd been there for two or three hours, and he was getting bored. Stake-outs are tiresome, muscle cramping, and often nonproductive. Occasionally, he talked by walkie-talkie with Officer Don Ford who watched and waited on the corner of Pensacola and Woodward.

And then Dickey saw a man walking toward the intersection, a man who had come from the Florida State stadium and driving range area. The man was in no hurry. He walked east on St. Augustine, and then cut north on Dunwoody, before disappearing between Cheryl Thomas's duplex and the house next to it.

The man wore blue jeans, a red quilted vest, a blue cap, and jogging shoes. j\s he passed under the street light on the corner, he looked

^er at the patrol car-briefly-and Dickey saw his face clearly. Later, when he saw a picture of Ted Bundy, Dickey would recognize him as the man who'd passed him so casually.

Leon County Deputy Keith Daws was working surveillance 295

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on the next shift-midnight to 4:00 A.M.-in an unmarked Chevy Chevelle. It was now the early morning of February llth-1:47 to be exact. Daws turned onto West Jefferson near the Chi Omega House and saw a "white male fiddling with a car door" up ahead of him. Daws eased his car up to where the man was bending over the door of a Toyota. When he saw the deputy's car in the middle of the street, the man stood up and looked around.

Daws identified himself and asked, "What are you doing?"

"I came down to get my book."

Daws saw that the man had a key in his hand . . . but no book.

"Maybe I'm stupid or something," the deputy drawled. "But you say you've come to get your book, and you don't have no book."

"It's on the dash on the other side of the car," the man answered easily. Daws studied him. He looked to be in his late twenties, wore blue jeans that looked brand new, an orange-red quilted "lining" vest. When he bent over with the key, the deputy could see there was no wallet in the back pocket of the jeans. The brown-haired man also looked

"wasted. . . . completely exhausted."

There was a book on the passenger side dashboard, but the man said he had no I.D. He'd just come down from his room. He hadn't parked on West College Avenue where he lived because all the spots were filled. That made sense; parking on campus was tight. First come, first serve. Daws shined his flashlight into the green Toyota's interior, and saw that the seat and floorboards were covered with papers. He saw the tiny tip of a license tag under the papers on the floor.

"Whose tag is that?"

"What tag?" The man was fumbling with the papers and his hand hit the tag.

"That tag you've got your hand on."

The man in the vest handed the tag to Daws, explaining that he'd found it somewhere, and never thought that someone might miss it. The tag read, 13-D-11300.

Daws didn't recognize the number, but he routinely walked

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over to his car radio to check it with "Wants and Warrants" for stolen. He left the man standing by the Toyota. Daws had one hand on his microphone and the tag in the other.

And then the man suddenly sprinted, running across the street, between two apartment houses, and leaping over a retaining wall. Daws was caught by surprise. The man had seemed to be cooperative. He would later ruefully describe the scene to a Miami jury. "The last time I saw him, I could have hit him with a baseball. You're talking about the width of this courtroom."

The runner had leapt over the retaining wall, directly into the back yard of the Oak . . . and disappeared.

The tag, of course, was registered to Randy Ragan, but, when Daws went to Ragan's house, he was obviously not the same individual who had run from the deputy. The man who had "rabbited" was later picked out of a photo line-up by Daws; it was Ted Bundy.

Daws, whose frustration at the near-miss was still evident when he testified in court, was even more disgusted when he read the next morning of the search for a Dodge van. There had been a white Dodge van with a flat tire parked-illegally-just behind the Toyota that the suspect was unlocking. When the detectives returned to look for it, it was gone. 1

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The man later identified as Ted Bundy had leapt over the retaining wall backing on the Oak and disappeared in those early morning hours of February llth. His landlord, who knew him, of course, as Chris Hagen saw him on the llth and noticed that he seemed "tired-like he'd really been through it. .."

Ted's stay at the Oak-and in Tallahassee itself-was about to end, but first, on the evening of February llth, he treated himself to one last meal at the Chez Pierre in the Adams Street Mall, a meal where the tab for the French cuisine and wine came to $18.50. He paid for it with one of the stolen credit cards, also charging a $2.00 tip. The waitresses at the Chez Pierre remember him because he had such "a cold air about him. He kept to himself. You couldn't make conversation with him. He ordered good wine. One night, he drank a full bottle and on another occasion he ordered a bottle of sparkling white wine and drank half of it."

Ted had always liked good wine.

On February 12th, he gathered up the possessions he'd accumulated; he had considerably more paraphernalia to carry with him than he'd had when he arrived in Tallahassee on January 8th-the television set, the bicycle, his racquet ball equipment. He gave a box of cookies to a girl down the hall, and he left.

He had wiped the room down completely. Later, detectives would find no fingerprints at all, no sign that anyone had spent a month in room number 12 at the Oak.

The white Dodge van, stolen from the Audio-Visual Department, was no longer useful; he abandoned it in front of

806 West Georgia Street in Tallahassee. On February 13th, it would be spotted and recognized by Chris Cochranne, an Audio-Visual employee, and would be taken in by police for me-298

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ticulous processing. The van was covered with a thick layer of dust and dirt-except for the area around the door handles and on the passenger door. There, the technicians processing the vehicle found "wipe marks" as if someone had deliberately tried to remove fingerprints. Doug Barrow, fingerprint expert for the Florida Department of Criminal Law Enforcement, also found wipe marks on some of the windows, and on the armrests and in other spots inside the filthy van. In other parts of the van he was able to lift fifty-seven latent prints-prints which all proved to have been left by Audio-Visual employees. There was so much dirt, so many leaves and particles of vegetable debris, in the back part of the van that it looked as if it had been placed there to obliterate whatever might be on the carpet beneath. And through this pile of soil and leaves, there remained the imprint of something heavy, something that had been dragged from the van. Serologist Stephens found two large dried bloodstains smeared on the synthetic carpeting, an unusual carpeting made up of green, blue, turquoise, and black man-made fibers. The stains proved to be from a person with type B blood. Mary Lynn Hinson, a crime lab expert in cloth fibers, was able to isolate a great many fiber strands which were caught and twisted in the van's carpet. She also photographed some distinct footprints in the pile of dirt-footprints left by a pair of loafers and by a pair of running shoes.